Shortcuts / Mixed Library behaviour

[Schar 4]

Hello

 

I've been an MB2 user and supporter for a number of years now. I've tried emby a couple of times in the past but never seen it through. Being the holiday season I've given it a good go this time, and the mobile clients are much further along than they were last time I tried. I am itching to push the supporter button but need to get things working cleanly first

 

Using MB2 with pearl has been very wife- and child-friendly. I have global collections (Movies / TV / Documentaries) and manage child and kid content with (gasp) a folder full of shortcuts.

 

I've done a bunch of reading and playing with emby over the past week, and have a couple of questions about trying to mimic this function as well as observations.

 

 

First scenario: I've set up my core TV and one Movie library (just the 3D movies - they were separate, fewer and faster to process). This is all working well.

 

The TV library tabs are all working beautifully, Latest, Upcoming, Episodes etc. Fantastic.

 

I've set up a library called TV Current. This is a folder with Windows Shortcuts to the shows we are currently watching. The system.xml EnableWindowsShortcuts setting is true.

 

My library builds, and all the shows are correctly seen in there. No missing shows in the logs. The shows tab works, but Latest, Upcoming and Episodes views (tabs) are all blank. The Upcoming view states:

Please ensure downloading of internet metadata is enabled. It is, and it works in the main TV tab.

 

Question: is this a known limitation of shortcut based TV libraries?

 

 

Second scenario: I set up another library of mixed content, and created a couple of folders full of TV shortcuts beneath them. This is mimicking the way I had it set up in MB2 (not a great reason but something I wanted to prove). My folders are grouping shows that are current vs those that are on hiatus and those that we have not started yet but want to watch. Like bookmarks. The main reason for this is to pare down the 400+ shows that are in the library to something a little more manageable.

 

This library builds, and the shows all show up in the individual folders. Each folder has a folder.xml in it for the display name and sort order (collection.xml seemed to force things into a movie state).

 

In the metadata manager I have indicated that each of the sub folders is a TV type; e.g.

 

TV List (mixed)

\ Current (TV)

\ On Hiatus (TV)

\ Queue (TV)

 

Question: when setting things up like this, can I enable the TV series functions at the folder level; i.e. the series / episodes / upcoming views over that folder?

 

This mode would then transpose to how I set up the kids views (although I'm happy to have a kids movies and kids TV library separate), and how I'd do my docs which are currently sub-foldered by studio (BBC / NatGeo etc).

 

 

Thanks!

 

[ebr 16187]

In your second scenario, why did you set that up as Mixed instead of TV?

[Schar 4]

I was trying to preserve the "folder" structure, if I set it up as TV all of it collapses into the single view from what I've seen. Trying to strike a balance between top level libraries and categorising content. Top level libraries in MB2 that I have include a large "favourites" tree (the TV structure above plus movies, with chick flicks for the wife in a separate folder) and then the normals: TV, Movies, 3D Movies, Mini Series, Sport, Docs, Home Videos, Kids, Music Videos...

 

That is the structure I'd look to use for documentaries if it works (grouped by BBC/NatGeo/Discovery etc), and the kids stuff (mix of movies / home videos / tv).

 

But - if I have this all wrong I'm more than happy to try something else.

 

Thanks for the answer!

[ebr 16187]

What if you set it up as TV but then uncheck that item in the "Enhanced Views" and "Group" sections of your display settings (user icon/settings)?

[Schar 4]

I'll give that a go - thanks!

[Schar 4]

Interestingly, if I set it as TV I get nothing showing up in the library at all. I've checked the config three times and it is all set up right. The sub folders are not showing up in metadata manager and the one shortcut I dropped into the root is also not resolving into a TV show. Compared to the mixed section where everything is showing.

 

I've rescanned the library (not getting any errors from that path in the logs) and restarted the server.

 

If I then uncheck the enhanced views, I get nothing at all in the library (just the sort icons and no content).

 

Because all the media is stored on UNRAID, I could manage TV shows with symbolic links under Linux, but I'd rather see if I can make it dance this way of course

 

 

Any thoughts on the first question - i.e. why I can see info in Shows, Genres, Networks and Recommended but Upcoming, Latest and Episodes are all blank?

 

(happy to run a dev version with extra debugging if that helps at all - just not sure what to turn on and off. Could even step through the rendering code if that is any use to compare the paths)

[ebr 16187]

Since shortcuts are basically not supported anymore this specific combination of things you are trying to do probably just doesn't work.

 

You probably will need to either give up the shortcuts or the sub-folder organization.

[Schar 4]

Understood - I'll keep having a play around to see what I can do - thanks for the feedback!

 

Is there a feature that I'm missing that would allow for the equivalent of multiple custom subsets of the main TV or Movies library (they don't need to be combined)? This is essentially what I'm trying to do, but would rather stop short of having to physically arrange my media in that way. As I mentioned I could use symbolic links to achieve the same thing (which becomes tricky across the multiple storage arrays

[Schar 4]

Or (at the risk of asking a silly question) - is there merit in having a library type that is a collection of libraries - i.e. allowing you to manage your top level structure like a traditional tree.

 

That way I could have a TV library for all my BBC docs, all my NatGeo docs and all my Discover Docs, and group all of them in a top level library called "Documentaries" that contains them all.

 

Thanks again